


bullets through rotten fruit

by isaksara (syailendra)



Series: Atsumu + Sakusa + The National = ? [6]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, Exes, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:54:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23594152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syailendra/pseuds/isaksara
Summary: Wakatoshi is impassive. “I was going to hire Shirabu after Atsumu turned me down. Then Atsumu called me to tell me he’d reconsidered. Is there a problem? From what I’d heard, you prefer to work with him, do you not?”Your information is outdated, Kiyoomi bites back. “He quit dreamshare a while ago. I just want to know what changed.”SakuAtsu Week Day 6:There’s a science to walking through windows without you.(Graceless)
Relationships: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Series: Atsumu + Sakusa + The National = ? [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691503
Comments: 12
Kudos: 210
Collections: SakuAtsu Week 2020





	bullets through rotten fruit

**Author's Note:**

> featuring [TOTO Seawind Awaji](https://www.booking.com/hotel/jp/seawind-awaji.html) Hotel, [21_21 Design Sight](https://matcha-jp.com/en/1507) Museum, and the [Hyougo Perfectural Museum of Art](https://matcha-jp.com/en/7863). No, I am not a Tadao Ando fan, although after reading this you might be forgiven for thinking that I am. Sigh.
> 
> title and prompt from Graceless by The National.

_There’s a science to walking through windows without you._

* * *

Kiyoomi watches as Bokuto steps on the pedal, propelling the car off into the vanishing point somewhere on the horizon line. Then the roaring comes, and he’s speeding in just behind the line of projections, with Atsumu leaning out of the window, letting loose a torrent of bullets. They’re both whooping.

“Eat my torus dust, bitches!” Atsumu bellows.

That’s probably a bad idea but Kiyoomi stifles a smile nonetheless.

He doesn’t register the roar that erupts behind him until he’s hurtling through the air. The sky is a gloomy grayish white, stretching endlessly for just one moment. His body crumples against concrete dust. He faintly registers pain in his leg, which must be broken; pain in his head, which is probably concussed; pain in his chest, and he has to look down to check the source. The exposed rebar keeps its shape but not its color. It glistens red, even in the weak winter light.

Pain is in the mind.

Atsumu is crouching over him, repeating his name again and again like it’s a prayer. His hands are on Kiyoomi’s cheeks, then his shoulders, then they hover down his chest to just over the spot where his lung is pierced. There is none of the glee he’d so openly vocalized not seconds ago. His eyes dart everywhere. His chest heaves quick breaths like he’s the one bleeding.

You’re not allowed to touch me like this, Kiyoomi wants to tell him. Not even here. The words don’t seem to be worth the pain it’ll cause him if he tries to force them out.

“How much time ‘til the next kick?” Atsumu asks Hinata.

“Five minutes.” Bokuto sits next to Atsumu. “Sakkun is coming down with me. That should slow things down. We’ll make it, Tsum-tsum.”

Kiyoomi’s running point, anyway, so Bokuto’s only saying this to soothe the frayed edges of Atsumu’s consciousness. He goes through the layouts of the next two levels quickly in his mind and calculates how much time it should take for them to finish the job, and how much it would take for him to bleed out in each level. He nods at Bokuto, who nods back.

Atsumu grips Kiyoomi’s hand. “If we don’t make it, I’ll go after ya. You know I will.”

Kiyoomi knows this. He also knows what he’s about to do is going to really fucking hurt.

He laughs in Atsumu’s face anyway, the way he doesn’t laugh at anything.

* * *

“Don’t touch me.”

The movement of Atsumu’s hands stop, and he drops them to the sides of his chair. Kiyoomi lets his own gloved hand trace the line of Atsumu’s jaw lightly before trailing it up his chin and resting the tip of his pointer finger on Atsumu’s bottom teeth.

“You can take the glove off,” Kiyoomi mutters. Atsumu’s teeth close over a tiny part of the fabric before he pulls, sliding the glove off Kiyoomi’s skin with naked hunger. He tosses it to the side. “But you can’t touch me. I’m going to touch you first, and once I’m satisfied, _then_ you can touch me. Is that clear? Can you do that?”

“Yeah,” Atsumu answers hoarsely. “Yeah.”

“Good,” Kiyoomi purrs. Atsumu flushes pink. It’s a lovely color on him. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a brass Zippo lighter; he lights it, then nods to himself as he snaps the lid shut and pushes it back into his pocket.

Kiyoomi’s fingertips barely hover over Atsumu’s skin—like a blind man reading Braille—as he draws a path from Atsumu’s chest, to the middle of his bared throat, up to his lush mouth. When Kiyoomi presses against it, Atsumu opens up.

Kiyoomi lets his forefinger slip in. Atsumu closes his mouth. His tongue darts against Kiyoomi’s fingertip, a curious flash of wetness. Then he sucks.

Heat goes through Kiyoomi so quickly he’s dizzy with it.

“Is this what you want?” Kiyoomi asks softly as he pushes further in. Atsumu nods, holding his gaze, continuing to lick Kiyoomi’s finger like he’s trying to memorize the shape of it. He presses down on the base of Atsumu’s tongue, just before his throat. Then he pulls his finger out slowly, using it to trace Atsumu’s lips, making them shine wetly in the warm light. Atsumu makes a sound like a whine.

Kiyoomi tsk’s. “So greedy,” he admonishes, but he pushes three of his fingers into Atsumu’s mouth anyway, his thumb pressing gently on the side of his jaw. Atsumu’s tongue swirls over every bit of skin as though he’s trying to suck Kiyoomi’s fingers as far as possible into his mouth. Kiyoomi crooks them, admiring the way they bulge against the inside of Atsumu’s cheek. He _will_ have Atsumu on his knees tonight. The best thing about it isn’t even the thought of looking down at his handsome face—Atsumu is six foot two and a monster in the boxing ring; he wouldn’t be on his knees unless he wanted to be.

Kiyoomi bends down to lean close to Atsumu’s ear, licking experimentally up the side of his throat. Atsumu’s groan is smothered against Kiyoomi’s fingers. Is this what Atsumu’s skin really tastes like, then?

“How are you feeling, Atsumu?” Kiyoomi asks as he pulls his fingers out of Atsumu’s mouth. He allows a few seconds for Atsumu to exhale and inhale, sounding like the rush of blood in Kiyoomi’s ears.

Atsumu breathes out a laugh. “Fuckin’ amazing. You have no idea how much I want you right now.”

“No, I don’t,” Kiyoomi says, just loud enough for the space between his lips and Atsumu’s ear. He lets his other hand brush against the inside of Atsumu’s thigh and relishes the sharp gasp he manages to draw out. “So let me know. Tell me how you want me to touch you.”

One day he’ll say this topside.

* * *

Some extraction teams come as a set. Extractor Kuroo, point man Yaku, architect Kenma. Oikawa, Iwaizumi, Hanamaki, and Matsukawa. You hire one, you hire all. There are certain benefits of hiring sets, the biggest of which is the members’ familiarity with each other. There are jobs where the team’s ability to communicate can make or break everything; Kiyoomi has known cases where petty arguments about floor plans led to non-zero body counts.

Atsumu and Kiyoomi do not come as a set. There is a certain portion of the world that seems to be under the illusion that they do anyway, and this portion is large enough that this mistaken belief has started to become a problem for Kiyoomi.

At first they kept getting hired together because they were evidently the best in their field. Then, because their colleagues kept seeing them on jobs together, they kept being recommended to people as a pair. And finally—this is Kiyoomi’s problem—because they kept working together as a pair, they got very, very good at it. 

Atsumu can spot the way Kiyoomi needs the sprinkler system to be wired without having to be told about it. Atsumu adjusts slope angles to fit the phobias of marks when Kiyoomi asks him to. Conversely, Kiyoomi knows where Atsumu puts his staircases when he doesn’t really think about them. Kiyoomi can read the patterns of Atsumu’s massing like the back of his hand. This is a problem, because eventually Kiyoomi starts disliking working with other architects—he’d worked with someone as good as Akaashi once and snapped at him, because Akaashi hadn’t adjusted the sewer system for their escape the way Atsumu would’ve. It wasn’t like Akaashi did it _badly_. It just wasn’t the way Atsumu would’ve done it.

Even more hazardously: when Kiyoomi works with Atsumu, he doesn’t have to be the one to explain that he doesn’t touch people, that he’ll bring his own needles and it’s not because he’s passing judgment on yours, and that he has certain drug allergies he already knows how to deal with. It’s convenient in a way that makes putting up with Atsumu’s puns and showboating worth it.

Atsumu and Kiyoomi do not come as a set, but after a certain number of iterations they might as well do so.

“Is there a particular reason you’re not looking to hire Atsumu for this job?” he asks Prakash, the client, one sunny morning as he goes over the brief. The architect Prakash wants to hire is Semi. Kiyoomi knows him; he has worked with him before. Smart. More than competent. Prone to show off, because he knows he’s good. In those ways he is like Atsumu, but he is notably _not_ Atsumu. Kiyoomi doesn’t know how yet, but this is going to be a problem. He can already feel the probable scenarios multiply under his skin.

Prakash hums. “Couldn’t find him.” This is ridiculous. Atsumu likes money. He also likes his job. It’s almost impossible for you to not be able to find him. Prakash’s a client, though, a partner at a management consultant firm with hands so clean you could probably eat out of them. He’s not going to get anything out of him.

It’s through the extractor they worked with on their last job—who redirects Kiyoomi to a chemist he knew from three years ago, who tells him about the forger couple in Kenya, who shows him an accidentally Cc’ed email—that Kiyoomi finds out there’s a hit out on Atsumu. Afterwards it’s child's play to figure out who did it.

He checks when he’s due to rendezvous with Prakash—seventy-two hours. That’s enough time to fly to Seoul and find Paeng in his home, eating peach pudding like he hadn’t tried to deprive dreamshare of one of its best players. Kiyoomi’s sitting at the kitchen table when Paeng comes in to wash his spoon. His documents are arranged in a neat grid in alphabetical order of their subjects’ names: Paeng’s daughter, Paeng’s ex-wife, and his great-uncle and great-aunt who live in Jeju.

Kiyoomi asks him, very softly, why he’d put a hit out on Atsumu.

Paeng gives him a stuttered story about some kind of idiotic bar dispute. See, Paeng’s probably not skilled enough to have pinged Kiyoomi’s radar already, so he really is quite disposable. Additionally, with this kind of attitude, it’s only a matter of time before he pisses off someone more willing to get his hands dirty than Kiyoomi and ends up as so much evidence on some coroner’s table. Kiyoomi figures he’s not worth the effort of drowning in the sink, so he just points at each of the photographs on top each file in turn, telling Paeng he knows where to find them.

Trembling, Paeng calls off the hit. Kiyoomi gathers up his things and leaves, only to run into Atsumu in the hallway, coming out of the lift. Atsumu gapes at him.

“What the hell are _you_ doing here?”

“I took care of it,” he says.

“Is he dead?”

“No,” Kiyoomi says. “I give him about four months, though.”

Atsumu laughs. “Yer a riot, Sakusa. Jajangmyeon, on me?”

Kiyoomi pulls out his phone and reschedules his flight.

“Sure.”

Turns out once you threaten a man’s family for someone, everything else is just a stone’s throw away.

* * *

Prakash, an extremely busy man with approximately fifty things on his Google calendar, tells them he has to get to Haneda to catch a flight as soon as he has his papers, and he’s booked the entire team’s rooms for one more night.

“With what this’ll get me,” he says in English, brandishing the papers Kiyoomi typed up for him after they woke up, “I might as well do a little bit of charitable giving anyway.”

The hotel is one of those modern creations that looks like a bunker but expects you to feel serenity when you’re inside it. The lobby features a concrete staircase so wide it’s just a curved stage away from being an auditorium. The dining room, though, is warmer, with pale wood floors and chairs as well as a floor-to-ceiling window that shows the unnervingly blue sea outside. Atsumu orders a bottle of _umeshu_ for them after their five-course dinner—all still on Prakash’s dime—and laughs about their mark’s projections’ weird footwear.

“She had a boyfriend at a summer course when she was a college freshman and he grew up to be a shoe designer. Those shoes were from his latest collection,” Kiyoomi says, warm from the liquor. They’re walking outside now, shoes making soft sounds as they displace the pebbles on the ground. The place is austere but that does mean the view hits harder; the resort sits on the side of an overgrown cliff, with nothing around for miles but the trees and the ocean. The structure stretches out of the cliffside. Wild branches jut out around them. Kiyoomi listens to the sound of the tide coming in.

“This didn’t make it into the mark’s file, right?” Atsumu asks, chuckling. 

“If it was relevant, I would’ve told you about it.”

“Maybe I could’ve made the stairs harder to climb for people with heels.”

“Doubt that would change much. If you’d added an incline to the street near the hospital, though.”

“And staggered the timing of the traffic lights by three seconds?”

They look at each other, then practically trip over themselves to get to the PASIV in Kiyoomi’s room. It’s not a thing they always do. On some jobs, things fit together so perfectly that there’s nothing left to optimize. If there is something, you can bet Kiyoomi and Atsumu will find it and they will fix it. They make their adjustments to the route and the layout, and they run through everything in three-fourths of the time it took them earlier.

A lot of people would call it a waste of chemicals and time. The job has been done, after all. The money’s already been wired to their bank accounts, and they’re not going to get bonuses for revisions. Atsumu’s laughing with triumph on the rooftop of a building in a fake city, the whipping wind not loud enough to drown it out—where’s the waste in that?

“That’s the biggest improvement with the smallest adjustments, so far,” Kiyoomi notes.

Atsumu grins at him. “Yeah. That means we’re getting better at spotting which things to fix.”

We, Atsumu says. Like it’s nothing. 

The lighting is Atsumu’s doing. It fills the sky with reddish gold, casting a sheer lustrous veil over everything. If this is Atsumu’s doing, then the way it frames his face and highlights his features must be vanity. His eyes are like honey. Kiyoomi is sure they’re never like that in the waking world.

“Hey, Sakusa.”

“Hm?”

“Ya still have a problem with being touched, even in dreams?”

He’s looking at Kiyoomi a certain way, so Kiyoomi decides to beat him to it. He takes one step forward, pushes one hand in Atsumu’s hair, and kisses him under the unreal sunset. It’s a bad idea. Lots of things are bad ideas, with Atsumu, so this is hardly novel. With the sound Atsumu makes, the way he grips Kiyoomi in return, the soft and pliant feeling of his lips against Kiyoomi’s, though, this is the first time one of those things seems like a good idea.

“I made a hotel, two streets down,” Atsumu mumbles.

“Presumptuous.”

“It’s called foresight.”

The room is suspiciously similar to the one each team member receives, down to the space-age bathroom fixtures. Atsumu pushes Kiyoomi on the cloud-soft mattress hungrily, then, when they wake after they’re done, takes him under again so they can use the jet showers in the bathtub.

They sleep on opposite sides of the bed. In the morning, Kiyoomi showers, puts on a suit, and double-checks the boarding time on his ticket to Malpensa. Atsumu’s still lazing around, shirtless, and Kiyoomi takes a moment to appreciate the way shadows dip to show the shape of the muscles on his back when he stretches like a cat.

“The guy who made his place,” Atsumu says, as Kiyoomi gets ready to leave, “never trained formally. He was a boxer, didja know? Saw a hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Tokyo and never turned back. Now he’s one of the biggest in Japan. The world, too. Funny how life works out sometimes, huh?”

Kiyoomi wonders if there’s a point to this. He asks Atsumu whether there is.

“Just tryin’ to make conversation, but of course ya wouldn’t know what that means,” Atsumu says. “Sakusa?”

Kiyoomi pauses with his hand on the door handle.

“You trust me?” Atsumu asks, sitting up. With what, Kiyoomi wants to clarify. With my work? With my body? With my life? Plenty of avenues you can go down, with that question. If they talk about things for too long, though, he really will miss his flight. He decides to go with the simplest answer.

“I do.”

“Good. ‘Cause I trust you,” Atsumu says. Kiyoomi nods at him and goes.

That’s worth more than love, in their line of work.

* * *

The moment he sees bleached blond hair, Kiyoomi spins on to face Wakatoshi, who’s looking at him like nothing is wrong. Kiyoomi has known Wakatoshi since the day they were plucked from their respective honors programs and put through five thousand and one tests before getting hooked up to the JSDF’s prototype PASIVs, before Kiyoomi decided to go down the path of corporate espionage and Wakatoshi chose to stick with the Ministry of Defense. All that time, and Kiyoomi still has no idea how to read him. Sometimes he thinks there’s nothing to read. Don’t get him wrong—Wakatoshi is a genius, undoubtedly, but personality-wise, he’s much simpler than you’d expect. 

“Wakatoshi-kun,” he says, “a word.”

Wakatoshi follows him to the bathroom, Kiyoomi turns around and checks his syringe. Still filled with solid resin up to the 0.5 cc mark. Then he pockets it and turns back to Wakatoshi.

“You told me Shirabu would be the architect on this job.”

Wakatoshi is impassive. “I was going to hire Shirabu after Atsumu turned me down. Then Atsumu called me to tell me he’d reconsidered. Is there a problem? From what I’d heard, you prefer to work with him, do you not?”

Your information is outdated, Kiyoomi bites back. “He quit dreamshare a while ago. I just want to know what changed.”

“I made him an offer.”

Kiyoomi raises his eyebrow. “And the offer was?”

“You’ll have to ask him yourself. I am not at liberty to disclose all our deals.”

The amount of desire Kiyoomi has to talk to Atsumu about things not strictly related to the job is negative. He returns to the room to find Atsumu chatting with Bokuto and Hinata, but he doesn’t miss the way Atsumu’s gaze stays on him as Kiyoomi announces that he’ll be going home earlier and he’ll see everyone when they start.

The job is strange, but Wakatoshi promises a handsome fee, and it’s much less dangerous than the Cobb case. Wakatoshi wants them to perform inception on—Kiyoomi has to blink when he first hears it—his adoptive brother and junior, Goshiki Tsutomu, who apparently refuses to believe that Wakatoshi is proud of him.

“You’re paying us to do what now?” Atsumu asks so no one else has to.

Wakatoshi grunts. “This is related to how I plan to groom Goshiki to lead one of Washijou Corp subsidiaries. His self-doubt is preventing him from becoming an effective decision-maker.”

That is quite a leap of logic there, but Kiyoomi will keep his mouth shut. If Wakatoshi’s paying, he’ll have his inception. Working with Atsumu is just the bitter pill Kiyoomi will have to swallow. It’ll go down easy. Kiyoomi will bet his entire cut of the pay that he and Atsumu still make an excellent team.

They do.

“Goshiki-kun was in the same program you and Ushijima-san were in, right, Sakusa-san?” Hinata asks. “So I guess we can safely assume his subconscious is militarized.”

“You don’t have to assume. It is.” This is Wakatoshi. He is a backseat extractor. It’s a good thing Hinata and Bokuto are gracious, and Atsumu is not an extractor.

Hinata frowns. “Right! So that’ll be fun, for us. With the kind of sedation we’ll need to go deep enough for inception, we’re looking at a risk of falling into limbo.”

Bokuto leans forward. “What kind of militarization?”

“The best kind the early days could give,” Kiyoomi says. “Full army-style boot camps in dreamspace. Tactics. War games. There was one strange instructor who was obsessed with Greco-Roman culture and used to simulate stuff from Thucydides.”

“Whatta freak,” Atsumu comments. Kiyoomi agrees, but he’s not about to interact with him. That is, until he finds Atsumu hunched over large rolls of paper one night, red arrows all over schematics. He’s gone over the movements Goshiki’s projections are likely to make with Kiyoomi and Wakatoshi, and from the red ink, Kiyoomi can guess that Atsumu’s absorbed enough that he’s overwhelmed by all of it, like a sponge being squeezed inside a river.

“You’re not going to outwit the JSDF with site plans.”

“Then what? I splash some colors on a canvas and let ya figure it out?” Atsumu snaps.

Kiyoomi rolls his eyes. “I never said that. The JSDF isn’t without flaws, especially since our training was conducted when the PASIV was still a prototype. Everything we did was essentially done on a flat plane. There was some texturing and rendering, but that was cosmetic.”

“Goshiki’s projections are gonna expect two non-parallel trajectories to meet exactly once.”

Nodding, Kiyoomi points at one of Atsumu’s master plans. “You can modify this so that’s not the case.”

“A sphere?”

“Spherical geometry is good. Easy to keep track of. But you’ve got me, Hinata, and Bokuto, so there’s no need to hold back. Try a torus if you’re angling for surprise attacks,” Kiyoomi says, leaning over. He doesn’t miss the hitch in Atsumu’s breath. He pretends to. “We’re going to need some peace and quiet on the third level, so if you can set up something like this—” Kiyoomi takes the pencil from Atsumu’s hand and sketches a Klein bottle, then circles the place where the self-intersecting tube folds outward, “—I’ll figure out a way to lead and trap them there.”

Atsumu yanks the pencil back. “My modeling software can’t do that.”

“You’re not the best in the business because you know how to use software, Atsumu.”

“Still think I’m the best?” Naturally he would choose to focus on this. Any other person would happily punch the shit-eating grin off his face. 

“I do,” Kiyoomi murmurs, and it comes out too sincere for comfort.

He tries not to think about the lost look on Atsumu’s face. Kiyoomi had been doing so well. He’d worked with Akaashi. He’d worked with Semi. He’d worked with Sugawara. He’d unlearned Atsumu’s staircases and adjusted himself to other architects’ master plans. He’d stopped expecting to know exactly how much he’d need to push a window whenever he’d open one to jump out of. And now, this.

D-Day comes. Kiyoomi hits the ground running. Bokuto and Hinata get Goshiki and do their forgeries. Bokuto fetches Atsumu so they can get the projections out of the way. Then, the explosion, and the hole punched by steel in his lung.

* * *

Kiyoomi is in love with a man who doesn’t trust him. He’d told Atsumu his given name one night, in a dream of gondolas and jade canals; Atsumu had immediately started coming up with nicknames, volunteering nothing in return. There’s a part of Kiyoomi’s heart that warms whenever they’re under, alone, and Atsumu says, “Omi-kun,” before kissing him. There is another part that stings.

He deals with the problem the only way he knows how: with research. While it’s common courtesy to not look things up with each other, you don’t spend some time in dreamshare without being a bit of a paranoid freak. Everyone buries their trail. Atsumu is no exception.

Kiyoomi digs everything up.

They’re under. It’s one of those times when Kiyoomi gets to watch Atsumu play around in his element, raising castles out of the ground, parting oceans to reveal cities. The man probably has some kind of god complex—but who’s Kiyoomi to talk? The ability to anticipate every possibility that keeps him frozen in the waking world makes him a deity in the world of dreams. Both he and Atsumu are insane in very specific, dreamshare-enabled ways.

He takes a deep breath.

“Miya,” he calls out, the surname unfamiliar on his tongue.

Atsumu turns. The blood drains from his face. He starts walking towards Kiyoomi.

“I know you have a brother.” Kiyoomi’s never been the best forger, but in dreamshare you pick up a little bit of everything along the way. He knows there’s a scar on Osamu’s nose that Atsumu doesn’t have. He watches his hands transform, then looks up. Atsumu is looking at him like he’s been shot in the gut. “Why didn’t you just—”

The bullet tears through his brain at the speed of light.

He wakes up staring down the barrel of Atsumu’s gun.

“If anything happens to him,” Atsumu says, voice shaking, “I’m hunting you down first.”

Word comes in through the grapevine not long after that Atsumu has quit dreamshare. Not taking jobs. Telling people he’s going to be a farmer in the Bahamas or a hawker in Singapore or a violinist in the Czech Republic. Everyone who calls him gets a different story.

Kiyoomi doesn’t try to call him. The man who said he loved you pulls a gun on you. How do you come back from that?

* * *

They make it. Kiyoomi wakes up gasping like there’s still blood flooding his lungs, and Atsumu—Atsumu is next to him already, clutching Kiyoomi’s sleeve.

“Om—Sakusa,” he says. “Go under with me.”

Kiyoomi knows what will happen if he does. He will let Atsumu kiss him, and Atsumu will probably say something stupidly sentimental that makes Kiyoomi forget he once threatened to kill him and then disappeared from the face of the Earth. Atsumu will whisper sweet nothings in his throat and Kiyoomi will believe him. There is so much he will unmake.

“No,” Kiyoomi tells him.

He’s the first to leave. There’s no flight ticket with his name on it; he takes one of the most expensive cab rides of his life to the hotel by the cliffside, where concrete nestles among wild branches, and the sea is endless just beyond.

He books a room. He sleeps alone.

* * *

He’s never been very partial to art. Kiyoomi spent most of his adolescence believing he’d grow up to be an expert in actuarial science. His dream industry had been insurance. In a way, it’s not like he’s deviated much from that—his job is still to calculate risks and to mitigate them. He just does it with more dreamed-up guns than Bayesian estimators.

It’s not the art he’s here for—it’s the familiar circular dips in the concrete walls and the staircase like a minimalist approximation of a dried-up waterfall. The paintings and sculptures change periodically. Kiyoomi doesn’t pay them any mind. He’s never understood art and he’s not going to gain much from trying. Through the glass, he thinks he could see the sea beyond Tokyo if he tries hard enough. He thinks of the story of the boxer and the building he fell in love with. The result, Kiyoomi walks through.

“Hey, stranger.”

Kiyoomi doesn’t turn around.

“Have you been following me?”

“I dunno. Have I?”

It’s been a few months since they wrapped up the inception for Ushijima Wakatoshi. In the meantime, Kiyoomi has finally managed to fall back into step with the rest of the dreamshare world. He’d pulled off impeccable extractions with Semi, Akaashi, Sugawara—even Kenma, when Yaku had been out of commission once. He comes back to this museum every time; it would be idiotic to go all the way to Awaji for something as silly as sentiment.

“Why are you here, Atsumu?”

“I thought I’d give you a heads-up. The government is planning to regulate dreamshare.”

This makes Kiyoomi turn around. “For civilians?”

“Yeah. Civilians. Along with a Ministry of Justice-mandated crackdown on corporate espionage.”

Kiyoomi will be put behind bars.

“You’ll be fine, Omi-omi. They’ll leave you out of it,” Atsumu says, not looking at him.

“Miya,” he growls, grabbing Atsumu by the collar. “How the hell do you know all this? Did you sell us out? I don’t have to hunt you down if you’re already here.”

Atsumu’s eyes glint. “Gettin’ even, are we? ‘Course not. I burn bridges, but I’m not ‘bout to set the entire world on fire at once. Ushijima told me, before the Goshiki job. That’s why you’ll be fine. Same for Hina-kun and Bokkun.”

“He didn’t pay you for that job,” Kiyoomi realizes as he puts Atsumu down again.

Rubbing at his collar, Atsumu scowls. “Yeah, he did. Depends on what you think is fair compensation fer a job well done.” He looks up at Kiyoomi, eyes shining with something Kiyoomi doesn’t want to name for his own good. “Think about it, Omi-omi. A world where we’d never have to keep any secrets from each other.”

“I never kept any secrets from you.” The words tear out from Kiyoomi’s throat so quickly he’s surprised he doesn’t bleed.

“That’s ‘cause you haven’t got nothin’ to lose,” Atsumu retorts.

“I had one thing.”

Suddenly he’s tired of it all. He’s tired of pretending he doesn’t know why Atsumu kept his surname under wraps and tired of pretending he doesn’t wish he’d just gone under with him after almost falling into limbo. He's tired of acting like he doesn't know when Atsumu's twenty paces behind him in Roppongi, buying flowers so it doesn't look like he's trailing him. He's tired of driving past Miya Osamu's house and wondering if he could have ever met the man, had he not gone and did what he did. He wants to look at the ocean and think of something other than Miya fucking Atsumu. 

Kiyoomi yanks Atsumu close by the collar and kisses him like an uppercut landing. Atsumu kisses back, hungry, fists in the front of Kiyoomi’s starched shirt, swiping at Kiyoomi’s teeth with his tongue like he’s daring him to bite. Kiyoomi does so. He tastes iron.

When Kiyoomi lets him go, Atsumu wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing red on the lower part of his cheek. Then, he fishes a brass lighter from his pocket and flips it open, flicks at the flint. It doesn’t light up.

“Sakusa Kiyoomi,” he says, looking back at him. “I lo—“

Kiyoomi presses a finger against his lips.

“Don’t you dare. I’ll kill you right here.”

He leaves Atsumu smiling and touched with blood. A world with no need for secrets—Kiyoomi will have to think about it. Later.

Kiryuu is waiting for him in a restaurant at Tokyo Midtown. Their client is a unicorn tech start-up founder who wears socks with his sandals and has more money than God, apparently. Kiryuu lays out the details of the job with his soft, soothing voice.

“We might need to recruit an architect. What do you think about Shirabu?”

Kiyoomi thinks of Shirabu’s flawlessly-separated utilities and organized room placements.

“Shirabu’s perfect.”

* * *

There’s a common arts and crafts project for kindergarteners that involves cutting a spiral into the surface of a piece of paper and letting the cut parts hang down, so that the tiny center hangs the lowest. The staircase leading up from the covered first story upwards looks like this. Everything is cast from concrete.

“What happens when it rains?” Kiyoomi asks as he starts to climb.

“Then ya get rained on!” Atsumu throws his arms skywards. “I think I’m finally getting it right. It always seemed off because the real staircase isn’t actually a perfect spiral, so I had to keep adjusting to match—”

“Atsumu. This is based on a real place?”

He stops in his tracks to look back at Kiyoomi. The light from up above him cuts his shadow sharply on the steps.

“Relax, Omi-kun. It’s a study, not a level for a job.”

Kiyoomi frowns. “It can still be dangerous if someone takes you down here.”

“And who’s gonna do that? Nobody knows about this.”

At the top of the staircase, they are flanked by two wings and a platform that faces Osaka Bay. Atsumu walks over to the edge overlooking the water, the wind ruffling his hair in waves, and points westward.

“We did the Prakash job somewhere over there, remember?”

Kiyoomi follows his finger with his gaze and squints. He feels like an idiot for expecting to see anything. Laughing, Atsumu steals a kiss from him before leading him around the building. The ceilings are absurdly high, and Atsumu has neglected to populate the walls with actual pieces, so Kiyoomi feels like an echo traveling through a cave as he walks. Atsumu keeps pulling him into random corners to make out; his excuse is that he can’t do it in the _real_ museum.

Atsumu hijacks a car from the parking lot. They drive to a neighborhood farther away from the city center. Atsumu has a thing for designing neighborhoods and homes. Kiyoomi’s never really understood the attachment—his household had been a home as much as it had been a factory line of accomplishments and certificates.

The house Atsumu stops in front of is much more generic than his usual creations, with calm blue walls and a pale yellow door. Atsumu insists on climbing up the drain to enter through the window. Kiyoomi rolls his eyes. He does it anyway.

They climb into a room with cartoon posters all over the walls and a bunk bed on one side. There are two toy cars lying near the bed—one red, one green. A yellow-blue Mikasa volleyball rests by the wardrobe. Atsumu pulls him by the hand outside, then downstairs, to a small dining room with a pantry behind it. In this perfectly ordinary dining room, the fabric of Atsumu’s shirt stretches thin over his back.

Kiyoomi puts his arms around him from behind, feeling Atsumu’s abdominal muscles clench beneath his hands. He lets one hand stay on Atsumu’s stomach while the other one wanders to Atsumu’s solid thigh.

“In the kitchen, Omi-omi? That’s nasty.”

“You like it. Now turn around,” Kiyoomi says in answer, low and full of promise. Atsumu laughs and does just that.

“One day, if you’ll let me, I wanna do this in real life. In a real house,” Atsumu says, his hand on Kiyoomi’s jaw. Kiyoomi kisses him so he doesn’t have to answer, pulling Atsumu flush against him. They could be dead in a month, or one of them could be in hiding. Too many possibilities. There’s no telling how long something like this can last.


End file.
